Abstract
This paper studies vehicle platooning with communication channels subject to random data loss. We focus on homogeneous discrete-time platoons in a predecessor-following topology with a constant time headway policy. We assume that each agent in the platoon sends its current position to the immediate follower through a lossy channel modeled as a Bernoulli process. To reduce the negative effects of data loss over the string stability and performance of the platoon, we use simple strategies that modify the measurement, error, and control signals of the feedback control loop, in each vehicle, when a dropout occurs. Such strategies are based on holding the previous value, dropping to zero, or replacing with a prediction based on a simple linear extrapolation. We performed a simulation-based comparison among a set of different strategies, and found that some strategies are favorable in terms of performance, while some others present improvements for string stabilization. These results strongly suggest that proper design of compensation schemes for the communications of interconnected multi-agent systems plays an important role in their performance and their scalability properties.
Highlights
The development of new technologies in the field of traffic highway management is currently a great challenge for the transition to a more efficient mobility
WORK In this article we studied platooning with random communication losses in the inter-vehicle channels that link two adjacent followers
We considered a predecessor-following topology for a homogeneous platoon described in the discrete-time domain
Summary
The development of new technologies in the field of traffic highway management is currently a great challenge for the transition to a more efficient mobility. In the context of networked control systems, two of the most common and simpler protocols are those that hold the last available data of the signals of interest, and those that set their values to zero when a dropout occurs These strategies are referred to as to-hold or to-zero type, and neither can be claimed superior to the other [28]. In this work we study predecessor-following platoons where the inter-vehicle communication is affected by random data-loss. We show, via numerical results, that the string stability of a platoon subject to data loss could be affected by the adopted strategy. The outline of this paper is as follows: In Section II we present the platooning configuration under study assuming perfect communication, while in Section III we incorporate the lossy channels in the framework and discuss the notion of string stability for platooning under random data-loss.
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